At his last anti-oilsands concert in Calgary, he left his five diesel tour buses idling outside throughout the entire concert.

They kept burning fuel. “Bio-diesel,” we’re assured, trucked in from the U.S.A., so I guess that’s OK.

Inside the concert, Young did something even weirder. All week, he had been comparing the oilsands to Hiroshima, claiming it caused cancer, that there was no reclamation of the land afterwards, that it caused pollution in faraway China, etc.. But then on Sunday, he said he was fine with all of it — he could actually support the expansion of the oilsands — if “the First Nations treaties (are) honoured.”

Huh? So all that Hiroshima talk was just a bargaining chip to get some legal tinkering?

It’s uncertain what Young means by “honouring the treaties,” which happened to be the name of his concert tour. Actually, “Honor the Treaties” was the title of his tour. It was designed in California, and they don’t spell honour with a ‘u’ down there.

They don’t do a lot of treaty honouring or honoring in California. It’s a state that didn’t sign any treaties with its Indians. They pretty much just wiped them out, including the Tongva tribe that used to live near Young’s massive 1,500-acre estate. Juana Maria was the last of the Tongva, and she died in 1853. Which is why Neil Young has to come up to Canada to lecture people about Indians.

Unlike California, Alberta signed a treaty with all of its Indians.

Young’s inability — over an entire week — to come up with a single example of how we’re not honouring them is easy to explain: “As far as me not knowing what I’m talking about, everybody knows that, that couldn’t be more obvious, I’m a musician.”
That aw-shucks routine gets Young out of situations where he embarrasses himself. But it’s just an act. You don’t amass a fortune of $65 million without being a sophisticated operator. And a sophisticated operator doesn’t start a multi-city concert tour without a deep-pocketed investor.

And that investor just happens to be an anti-oilsands lobby group in California called the Tides Foundation.
They’re the same ones who wired $55,000 directly into the bank account of a numbered corporation of the northern Alberta Indian chief who joined Young on tour.
While we don’t know the details of the payments, or how much if anything Neil Young was paid to perform on the tour, it sure looks to me like Tides sponsored the whole tour.

Honor the Treaties has one “fiscal sponsor,” called the Lakota People’s Law Project. And their major donor is the Romero Institute — an anti-industry group. And their big donor is the Tides Foundation — almost half a million dollars in just the past few years.

All of them are located just a few miles from each other — and Young’s estate — in California.

It’s not often that a lobby group sponsors a concert tour. Normally it’s a financial investor, looking to make a profit. Or a marketing sponsor like a beer or soft drink company. But Tides wasn’t looking to sell itself; it likes to stay in the shadows and use wire transfers and numbered companies.
Each year, Tides pays out more than a million dollars to anti-oilsands groups in Canada.

But how many people who went to Young’s concerts knew they were being marketed to by San Francisco lobbyists?
And how many reporters, covering that “independent artist” Neil Young, knew his tour was part of a Tides campaign?

“ The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. ” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.